From Germany, with love, marrow

A 10-year-old Kolar boy, diagnosed with aplastic anemia, had a Bone Marrow Transplant done after finding a donor at the German registry. This procedure marked the 1,000th Bone Marrow Transplant (BMT) at the Mazumdar Shaw Cancer Centre at Narayana Health City.

Sam, a 10-year-old boy from Kolar, was bleeding from the nose. A bone marrow examination confirmed aplastic anemia and his only chance was a BMT transplant. Unfortunately, he did not have a matching donor available.

Doctors said they frantically searched for a donor in all the registries and finally found a donor in the German registry. The donor was willing to donate bone marrow, rather than peripheral blood stem cells. The blood groups were mismatched and hence red blood depletion had to be done before the infusion of the cells after they arrived from Germany. Four weeks later, the boy’s counts fully recovered and were discharged.

The bone marrow transplantation was done on October 18. On Wednesday, over 100 unique BMT cases were felicitated at an event in the city by Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, Dr Devi Shetty, Dr Sunil Bhat, and Dr Sharat Damodar. Sam’s father Suresh said, “On June 18, we saw that his lips were turning white. Initially, we went for jaundice treatment. After blood test, we found a great drop in platelets counts. A doctor in Kolar referred us to Dr Sarath Damodaran.”

Dr Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw Chairman and Managing Director, Biocon Limited, said: “I am proud to be part of this journey to build one of India’s largest Bone Marrow Transplant Centres.”

Dr Devi Shetty, Chairman and Executive Director, Narayana Health, said, ‘In India, there are over 1 lakh patients with serious blood-related disorders diagnosed every year and the only long-lasting line of treatment for them is Bone Marrow Transplant. We started this unit in 2004 with a vision to offer world-class treatment.”

Getting donors tough

According to Marrow Donor Registry India, at any time, all over the world, there are about 3,000 patients searching for a donor for a Stem Cell transplant and less than 30% of those find a suitable donor within their family. Rest of the 70% depend on unrelated donors which indicates that very few people receive the best possible treatment. To address the deficit, a cord blood banking facility was established two years back in collaboration with Rotary International, which functions both as a public and private cord blood facility.